"Sleep on! Sleep on! Tek yo' res'! Muh brudder, yo'll not be er-sleepin' een dat day! Go on wid yo' sleepin'¡ A-a-a-a!" his voice arose to a sardonic, nasal cry. "Yo'll all be glad ter hab er Go'd den, een dat day, w'en de stahs een de element is er-fallin'! Sleep; an' go on er-sleepin'! Yo'll not be er-sleepin' much een dat day! Oh, wut er happy time fuh dem wut is bin redeem'! De fawtheh an' de son kin gone tuh de same prayeh-meetin' an' prayeh de same prayeh; de muddah an' her daughtah kin gone tuh de same chu'ch an' hyeah de same summon! Oh, muh dyin' brederin, wut er happy day dat gwine ter bin!

"Ol' Ezekium-m-m-m, 'e shill be deah; an' Jeremium-m-m; an' David, little Davy, twelve yeahs ol', whut stood up, erlone by 'isseff, wid er sling-stone, an' fit Goliah, champeen er de Phistillions, an' puhsuv de constitootionality er de Hebrews; little baby boy Davy, jes' twelve yeahs ol', 'e gwine be deah! Yes,

suh; dey all gwine be deah! Oh, whut er blessed day! . . . An' dey shill hongry no mo'; dey shill thusty no mo' . . . an' de Lo'd gwine wipe away all de teahs fum dey yeyes!"

His voice suddenly dropped to as quiet and unmoved a tone as if he were speaking only to the one-armed deacon who sat close behind him: "Muh dyin' brederin, we'll be led in prayeh. I meant tuh be gentle wid yuh ter-night; but yo'-all done got me stirred up. I want yo'-all tuh git down on yo' knees, tuh-night, flat on de flo'. Dis yuh's de las' night er dis revibal, an' none er you do'no w'en yo' call gwine come! Git down on yo' knees, ebbry one er yuh!”

To their knees dropped all, their heads buried deep in their folded arms upon the rude benches; a rustling went through the church.

"Ouah Fawtheh wich is in hebben; hyeah de prayeh w'at gone up to Thee fum dis yuh chu'ch! Out'n all de blessin' wut you hab in hebben sen' down one on Little Saint John's. Lo'd, write ouah name in de Lamb book o' life . . . we

shill hongry no mo' . . is bin in gret tribulation

...

wipe away all de teahs fum dey yeyes . . . dey gwine nebbah no mo' tuh sorruh, nebbah no mo' ter cry! De Lo'd Jesus say, w'en 'e preach een de mountings, 'Blessed is dem dat hongry, fo' dem shill be fill . . . dey shill hongry no mo'! De Sperrit tell um say 'Come! Yea, tell hit ter all de chu'ches: come runnin'! I know yo' labuh an' yo' bon's; I know dat yo' bin mean as grass wut pa'ach een de ubben; but come, an' come er-runnin', an' I gwine gib yo' a new name wut nobuddy ebbah yeah . . . 't is er name wut nobuddy knows. An' I gwine gib yo' de mo'nin' stah fo' er play-t'ing . . . efʼn yo' keep good watch."

"Watch! Oh, good Lo'd, watch!" rose the wailing moan of the congregation. "Dey gwine feed us 'pon dem hebbenly manniehs!"

"Watch! Oh, good Lo'd, my Lo'd!" "De Lion uv Judea."

66

'Oh, my sweet Jesus! Lamb er God'!”

"E got poweh tuh sabe all soul 'pon topper dis yer uth, er 'pon de sout' side er de globe. . . an' dey gwine hongry no mo'! An' we gwine be w'ite, my brederin, w'ite, wash'in de blood ub de Lamb! An' dey gwine show us de t'ings w'ich gwine ter be . . . an' de angel, an' de beas', an' de multitude er de Redeem' dey all gwine sing, 'Holy, holy, holy, holy, Lo'd Go'd A'mighty! To Thee gwine be glory an' honuh an' poweh!' An' dey gwine hongry no mo'. . . . . dey all gwine weah crowns er glory an' robes er salbation . . . an' dey gwine res' er season fum dey wuk . . . an' dey gwine thusty no mo' an' no mo' sorruh, ner cryin'!... Oh, Lo'd, we is dem wut is come outer gret tribulation. . . . How long, Lo'd? How long?"

...

A murmur ran through the church, rising slowly, ceasing, slowly ebbing away like the sound of a wave along a beach: "Dis time unaddah yeah I may be

gone,
In some lonesome grabeyahd.
. . . Oh, Lo'd, how long?"

As quietly as if no previous great emotion had stirred him, the preacher ended: "Lo'd, we know dat the Millemium ain't gwine ter come 'til dis yuth bin convuhted. De yuth not gwine convuhted till dis wicked race prejucidy cease an' Lo'd, dis race prejucidy ain't gwine cease tell some one tek 'e courage in 'e han' an' gone ter de Naytional Gubberment wut bin in Washi'ton, an' tell de gret Administratuh: 'Dis yuh race prejucidy mus' cease! Yes, suh; hit mus' cease!' An' hit ain' gwine cease ontel de Naytional Gubberment an' de gret Administratuh bin convuhted an' do right. Lo'd, we know ebbry man gwine be jedge een dat las' day 'cordin' ter 'e lib, an' dem wut's name ain' writ een de Lamb book er life gwine ride dat w'ite hoss wid dem daid mens, an' gwine cas' een er lek er fiah wid dem wut bin two time daid ... an' nobuddy ain' gwine hide um no mo' fum de face er an angry Go'd. But, oh, Lo'd Go'd, tek we inter de kingdom an' de patience; fo' we is de bruddeh er John een 'e hahd trial!"

"Dat's so, Lo'd!" huskily added the voice of the one-armed deacon.

"Lo'd, let dem wut yeah tell dey nabuh ter come... tell um say 'Come er-runnin'. . . tell um say 'Come quick!'

dat dey all gwine be convuhted!" "Eben so, good Lo'd; eben so!" said the voice of the one-armed man.

"An' w'en de ol' shippy er zion come er-sailin' roun' de ben', an' de angel er de Lo'd come er-flyin' down tuh put on de wings er de mo'nin', Lo'd Jesus, put 'em on fawtheh an' motheh, sistuh an' bruddah, w'ite, black, an' yelluh mens alak. Amen, Lo'd, amen!"

The meeting went on, to what end I do

yahd

Lo'd, how long?

not know. With no desire to laugh, with no desire to mock, my companion and I arose and went out from the place, thoughtfully; with patience wondering to what end, dear Lord, Lord of white man and black, - -to what end, and to what far purpose, in Thy kingdom everlasting, and here upon earth? The faint yellow light of the two doorways shone down the steps and followed us into the darkness. We looked back once. The still pines were silhouetted before the church; the night wind sang a wild refrain to the song below; the trees moved gently in the wind; green leaves with a thousand countless edges rustled sharply in the white moonlight. The mountains seemed unreal, crystalline.

Postscript. Strange and grotesque as this sketch may seem, ridicule of any sort is utterly outside the writer's purpose. The body of the sermon is absolutely as preached at Little St. John's, with simply a few elisions to obviate the incessant repetition to which the negro preacher is prone. The writer feared to condense, lest only the strikingly grotesque phrases should be the ones retained, and the sermon's crude, childlike, emotional eloquence be misrepresented. The smile seems inevitable, but it is certainly coupled with pity and wondering thoughts. As to the music: no attempt is made in the scores to give harmonies, save in one slightest instance. No score written could convey the barbaric and stirring effect of a congregation of primitive negroes singing an old-time spiritual song. Some of the airs to these spiritual songs are in the pentatonic scale, some in the compass of a tetrachord, some

correspond to various of the mediæval modes, while others are irreducible to European scales, containing, as they often do, such quarter-tones or other fractional intervals as are found in the Siamese system; their harmonies are correspondingly wild and irregular, being for the greater part accidental or instinctive, except under direct white influence. The personal reproofs directed at the congregation by the preacher were all in sharp, ironic, conversational tone; but the remainder of the sermon, after the opening passages, was chanted, from first to last, upon four tones, shown in the angel's cry of "Woe, wo-oh!" The tones employed were usually those of the address "John, O John!" used with infinite variation. To this intoning Sidney

Lanier refers interestingly at the close of his Science of English Verse. The foregoing sermon and service may be taken as typical of the primitive negro churches of the South. In contact with the whites they are less, in remoter districts and in the low country of the coast much more, primitive and strange. Such services are always highly emotional, sometimes hysterical, almost madly corybantic, combining with a half-Christian service a half-pagan frenzy. A sermon more thoughtful, more logical, more ethical than the foregoing would be apt to receive some such discouraging reception as met "the educated nigger's" sermon on the Altamaha, in W. E. B. DuBois's sketch, "The Coming of John," in The Souls of Black Folk.

TEN or a dozen years ago, the exact date is here immaterial,—an enterprising newspaper publisher conceived the idea of appealing to what is known as the American 'sense of humor" by printing a so-called comic supplement in colors. He chose Sunday as of all days the most lacking in popular amusements, carefully restricted himself to pictures without humor and color without beauty, and presently inaugurated a new era in American journalism. The colored supplement became an institution. No Sunday is complete without it, not because its pages invariably delight, but because, like flies in summer, there is no screen that will altogether exclude them. A newspaper without a color press hardly considers itself a newspaper, and the smaller journals are utterly unmindful of the kindness of Providence in putting the guardian angel, Poverty, outside their portals. Sometimes, indeed, they think to outwit this kindly interference by printing a syndicated comic page without color; and mercy is thus served in a half portion, for, uncolored, the pictures are inevitably about twice as attractive. Some print them without color, but on pink paper. Others rejoice, as best they may, in a press that will reproduce at least a fraction of the original discord. One and all they unite vigorously, as if driven by a perverse and cynical intention, to prove American sense of humor a thing of national shame and degradation. Fortunately the public has so little to say about its reading matter that one may fairly suspend judgment.

the

For, after all, what is the sense of humor upon which every man prides himself, as belonging only to a gifted minority? Nothing more nor less than a certain mental quickness, alert to catch the

-

point of an anecdote or to appreciate the surprise of a new and unexpected point of view toward an old and familiar phenomenon. Add together these gifted minorities, and each nation reaches what is fallaciously termed the national sense of humor, an English word, incidentally, for which D'Israeli was unable to find an equivalent in any other language, and which is in itself simply a natural development of the critical faculty, born of a present need of describing what earlier ages had taken for granted. The jovial porter and his charming chance acquaintances, the three ladies of Bagdad, enlivened conversation with a kind of humor, carefully removed from the translation of commerce and the public libraries, for which they needed no descriptive noun, but which may nevertheless be fairly taken as typical of that city in the day of the Caliph Haroun.

The Middle Ages rejoiced in a similar form of persiflage, and the present day in France, Germany, England, or America, for example, inherits it, — minus its too juvenile indecency, in the kind of pleasure afforded by these comic supplements. Their kinship with the lower publications of European countries is curiously evident to whoever has examined them. Vulgarity, in fact, speaks the same tongue in all countries, talks, even in art-ruled France, with the same crude draughtsmanship, and usurps universally a province that Emerson declared "far better than wit for a poet or writer." In its expression and enjoyment no country can fairly claim the dubious superiority. All are on the dead level of that surprising moment when the savage had ceased to be dignified and man had not yet become rational. Men, indeed, speak freely and vaingloriously of their national sense

of humor; but they are usually unconscious idealists. For the comic cut that amuses the most stupid Englishman may be shifted entire into an American comic supplement; the "catastrophe joke" of the American comic weekly of the next higher grade is stolen in quantity to delight the readers of similar but more economical publications in Germany; the lower humor of France, barring the expurgations demanded by Anglo-Saxon prudery, is equally transferable; and the average American often examines on Sunday morning, without knowing it, an international loan-exhibit.

Humor, in other words, is cosmopolitan, reduced, since usage insists on reducing it, at this lowest imaginable level, to such obvious and universal elements that any intellect can grasp their combinations. And at its highest it is again cosmopolitan, like art; like art, a cultivated characteristic, no more spontaneously natural than a "love of nature." It is an insult to the whole line of English and American humorists Sterne, Thackeray, Dickens, Meredith, Twain, Holmes, Irving, and others of a distinguished company to include as humor what is merely the crude brutality of human nature, mocking at grief and laughing boisterously at physical deformity. And in these Sunday comics Humor, stolen by vandals from her honest, if sometimes rough-and-ready, companionship, thrusts a woe-begone visage from the painted canvas of the national sideshow, and none too poor to "shy a brick" at her.

At no period in the world's history has there been a steadier output of so-called humor, especially in this country. The simple idea of printing a page of comic pictures has produced families. The very element of variety has been obliterated by the creation of types, a confusing medley of impossible countrymen, mules, goats, German-Americans and their irreverent progeny, specialized children with a genius for annoying their elders, white-whiskered elders with a genius for playing practical jokes on their grand

children, policemen, Chinamen, Irishmen, negroes, inhuman conceptions of the genus tramp, boy inventors whose inventions invariably end in causing somebody to be mirthfully spattered with paint or joyously torn to pieces by machinery, bright boys with a talent for deceit, laziness, or cruelty, and even the beasts of the jungle dehumanized to the point of practical joking. Mirabile dictu! some of these things have even been dramatized.

With each type the reader is expected to become personally acquainted,- to watch for its coming on Sunday mornings, happily wondering with what form of inhumanity the author will have been able to endow his brainless manikins. And the authors are often men of intelligence, capable here and there of a bit of adequate drawing and an idea that is honestly and self-respectingly provocative of laughter. Doubtless they are often ashamed of their product; but the demand of the hour is imperative. The presses are waiting. They, too, are both quick and heavy. And the cry of the publisher is for "fun" that no intellect in all his heterogeneous public shall be too dull to appreciate. We see, indeed, the outward manifestation of a curious paradox: humor prepared and printed for the extremely dull, and what is still more remarkable excused by grown men, capable of editing newspapers, on the ground that it gives pleasure to children.

Reduced to first principles, therefore, it is not humor, but simply a supply created in answer to a demand, hastily produced by machine methods and hastily accepted by editors too busy with other editorial duties to examine it intelligently. Under these conditions "humor" is naturally conceived as something preeminently quick; and so quickness predominates. Somebody is always hitting somebody else with a club; somebody is always falling downstairs, or out of a balloon, or over a cliff, or into a river, a barrel of paint, a basket of eggs, a convenient cistern, or a tub of hot water. The comic